Providence
by f3tid
Summary: "Tish," Gomez murmured languorously against her flesh, "How do you say 'destiny' in French?"
1. Sanctuary

**A/N:** It's been a while since I waded into fanfiction territory, so bear with me if I'm a little rusty at this. Check out the link on my profile page to read Providence as intended.

**Disclaimer:** I do not own, nor claim ownership of any of the characters used. The Addams Family and all affiliated storylines, characters, and productions all belong to the Chas and Tee Addams Estate.

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The peremptory cry of withered limbs and nigh lifeless greeneries subdued and discarded any and all other thoughts entertained by the fair creature's long restless mind. Her frail fingers encircled a tin watering can coated in a gossamer thicket of dust as she chided herself for her insufficiency, distressed by the shoddy state of her garden. She wasted no time debating which of her plants she'd gratify with a quenching shower and instead tended to the wilting spines and balding fronds nearest her perch. She was ambivalent to caress the once spry, florid leaves of a particularly skeletal shrub and elected against it, deterred by the entirely palpable potential for them to collapse. Her guilt was peaking.

"Morticia, the plants again?" The abject silence of the sanctuary, fetid and comfortable, was imbued suddenly by the pointed singsong of a woman slighted, "Really, darling, they can be pruned and watered any time. I only get one first impression, however."

The young horticulturist was still consumed by her onus, though her sister's presence made it all the easier to façade with dissonance. Her frown stiffened and her entrails knotted. She was hurt.

"Morticia, I'm speaking to you." the woman said deliberately, probative in an effort to receive a reply. She was incapable of hostility, she knew, but attempted it regardless.

The breadth of the girl's proud shoulders collapsed on exhale and she hung her head. The room resonated with the calamitous clatter of the watering can against the table top as she gruffly dislodged it from her fingertips before pirouetting sloppily on her heels. She unearthed the nerve to stamp ahead a few paces and rooted herself in place, watching in withdrawn perturbation as her sister ensconced herself upon the weeding table in the corner. She pondered a severe expression for a moment, but felt remorseful for narrowing her eyes at the otherwise faultless woman. Her fingers toyed with the loose ebony strands punctuating either of her plaits. She never knew what to do with her hands.

"Ophelia, I understand your feelings. I've _understood_ your feelings for days, now, and it's driven me from my garden. If you'd leave me to my plants for just a few minutes, I'd be happy to go right back to commiserating with you, but I can't be left to my devices without first being _left_."

Ophelia plucked at the decrepit flower petals haunting the tabletop upon which she sat, noticeably troubled by the juxtaposition of petrified black plant flesh upon her own. She promptly discarded them once more, spooked at the very thought of decay. "It's not commiseration I want, dear, not tonight."

"Is it tonight?" the more stoic of the siblings iterated incredulously.

The woman nodded with a grandiose gesticulation of her hands, leaping from the table and setting the nursery aglow with her smile. "Come with me!"

Her flaxen locks swelled languidly in accordance to her every enthusiastic endeavor, pooling about her bare bronzed shoulders in sedentariness and flowing in all manner of directions in times of fluidity. Ophelia was rare to stagnate, as her attention was easy to woo and just as easy to falter, and as such she found herself striding melodically toward anything remotely enticing. Her more constant inclinations resided with nature and music, a shallow pair of interests she shared with her sister as part of a shallower pool of similarities between the two. Lush blossoms adorned her crown and attire, variant hues and aromas aplenty reamed around her visage, entangled in her hair and very nearly sprouting to life on the ground she trod.

Morticia's eyes widened as her sister approached her, every footfall of her bare soles inspiring a searing pinprick in the fine tissue of her palpitating heart. Apprehensions aside, however, the younger of the two women exuded a physical composure very nearly unattainable, regret and ire perishing in favor of temperance and measure. Her naked lips were an inscrutable line and her eyes, though massive and reflective of the low hanging lamplight, were similarly enigmatic.

"Me? But Mother was so intent on supervising." She feigned a vague sort of despondence.

The tow-headed ingénue snickered complacently as she swayed on her toe tips about the girl's rigid frame, reaching out with inquisitive fingers for her hair and smock. "Oh, Mother's quite set on supervision. As for who it is that's doing the supervising, she's a tad more lenient."

"You're not serious," she followed the woman's every move with unapologetic skepticism, "You know I don't like people."

"Then ignore them! It's just a formal way for the Addams boy and I to meet before Mother, Father, and his parents discuss the wedding plans, the dowry, all that. Think of it as a little get-together among friends." Ophelia had put her dancing to a temporary halt, more interested in disheveling the prim braids on either hemisphere of her sister's head.

Dissatisfied by the brief description of the evening's festivities, the girl pursed her lips and hinged a well-manicured brow. "I don't like parties, either."

"Well, you're in luck," she was perfunctory and lethargic in speech, not nearly as overtly boisterous as she had been before. A grin toyed provocatively at the corners of Morticia's mouth as the woman raked her nimble, sun-kissed fingers through the liberated sable tendrils draped over either of her shoulders. The tentative affection was nothing if not bribery, both were aware, but she welcomed it all the same.

"It's a funeral."

"A funeral?" the words burst free of her lips before she could devote any pragmatic thought to the matter, her heart rapping insatiably at her chest and a patient grin sprawled across the pallid canvas of her face, unshackled. "Open casket, do you think?"

Ophelia laughed, sweeping her sister's hair betwixt her fingers. "I don't know. I guess you'll just have to come and see for yourself."


	2. Coup de Foudre

**A/N: **Hello again, everyone! I didn't intend on releasing the second chapter so soon after the first, but the story got a lot of traffic pretty quickly and I'd rather catch up with all the chapters here before starting the fourth. If you'd like to read the story as intended, please check out my profile page and click the link to my Mibba stories, and read the original form of Providence there. Thank you so much for reading. Reviews are always appreciated. Happy Halloween!

**Disclaimer:** I neither own, nor claim ownership of any of the characters, plotlines, and/or productions used in the following piece of fiction. The Addams Family and all related names belong to the Chas and Tee Addams estate.

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The night encompassed them on all sides, caressing bare flesh with an alienating tinge of frigidity. Every object and accoutrement of the front yard and the acres outlaying had a blackness about it, the withering blades of grass buckling beneath the breeze and the lofty copses in the distance, their lush limbs trembling in much the same fashion. The skyline was unremarkable, overcrowded with evanescent fog and the warm glow of civilization just licking the horizon. Were it an unhindered evening, the stars would've been absolutely breathtaking. Or so she'd have wagered, at least.

Morticia listened attentively as she and her sister's town car accelerated primly down the boulevard, noting the driver's haste to make scarce of himself. She couldn't sympathize, she lamented, as she gaped in nothing short of enamor at the stories tall Victorian residing on the knoll before her. The tall, imposing ebony doors standing sentinel at the cusp of a narrow cobblestone pathway bore down upon her with a challenging stare. Punctuating the manor's severe veneer were a conglomerate of French windows, some decayed by time and others violently shattered into a number of enticingly jagged shapes. She beamed unabashedly, a rare and frequently short-lived feat. Her inertia overcome by an alien compulsion, she drew nearer to the corroding outer gate, gingerly winding her small and fragile fingers round its iron rungs.

Lacking sufficient breath to execute the wistful, wanton sigh tempting her meek lungs, the girl thirstily consumed a gulp of air. "Gracious," she gasped.

"It _is_ frightful, isn't it?" Ophelia mistakenly corroborated, sauntering close on her toes.

The amorous creature stepped promptly from the gate, impassioned at the decrepit estate's defense. "It's enchanting!" she recoiled at the very volume of her voice. "Wouldn't you agree?"

"It's likely haunted. There's a cemetery on the property, or so Mother says."

"Mother isn't known for her inaccuracy."

"Why else have a funeral service at home? Certainly not for comfort's sake." The woman grated her teeth against the cold and thusly tugged her shawl over her bare shoulders, only to have it inch back in place at the crook of her arms. "Well, let's go. It's impolite to keep people waiting."

Before the last of the graceful doe of a woman's words could disembark from her parted lips, the barred egress shrieked in action. Both girls pivoted quite suddenly toward the broadening pathway. Perplexed and incredulous, they watched the antique metalwork ease on its hinges in salutation. Their eyes met for a number of mute moments before the junior of the pair teetered on her heels and over the threshold unto the spectacularly dismal Addams property. Morticia advanced a cautious few paces before blindly motioning her sister along. Ophelia acknowledged the interminable and impossibly expanding grin gracing her dear sister's countenance with a smile of her own.

A trundle through the exotic and altogether bizarre vegetation accenting the otherwise barren passage toward the entrance concluded with the arrival at the magnificent doorstep, either of the tandem doors equipped with a heavy iron fixture in the form of a gargoyle. The façade returned to the young women their expectant stares until one of them volunteered to trigger the doorbell.

Ophelia's slender digits hesitantly encompassed the knob, both hands relegated to the unexpectedly arduous task of dislodging the rusted thing from its notch in the doorframe. She yanked laboriously once, furrowing her brows at the girl a pace adjacent before a second attempt.

Her body was petite in all facets of physicality, particularly lithe about the belly and chest. Her skin was bronzed from activities undertaken beneath the roiling incandescence of the sun, visible even in the pallor of moonshine. Morticia infrequently discovered a semblance of envy for her sister's invitingly warm appearance and manner, but never strong enough to inspire animosity or anything of the sort. She watched in subdued surprise as Ophelia's lean muscles strained beneath the force of her antics and the stubborn knob, becoming more defined as her determination swelled. The knob sprung free of its confines without warning, jostling the dancer from her expert stance and producing a deafening carousal from the abode's interior. Both girls rooted their feet, even as the doors began to collapse on axis.

"Lurch, who's that at the door?" struck the shrill peal of a voice pertinently weighted by a foreign vernacular. Spanish, Morticia inferred thoughtfully.

Obstructing the range of the alarming cacophony was the doorman, statuesque and thick shouldered. His half hooded eyes presided on sunken, fatigued flesh skeletal in structure with every contour of his face readable. Legs spread territorially and unkempt brows knotted, the man glowered down upon the visitors with an involuntary air of aggression. His baritone rumbled the fine marble beneath his feet.

"Ladies," the fantastic behemoth grumbled from the cavernous depths of his mighty chest.

"_'Ladies'_?" the voice from before repeated, this time significantly closer in proximity, "It's a funeral party, Lurch, you'll need to be more specific."

As was habitual, Ophelia took initiative. "We're the Frumps – Ophelia and Morticia. I understand you've been expecting us?"

"Frumps," the lofty lummox incited once again. He took a mechanical step in retreat, swiveling his head to look expectantly at the steadily impending owner of the jarring tone.

A small and pleasingly homely looking woman, bowed at the knees with reedy spine stooped well over her waist. Clad in ample layers of squalid fabrics, exuding an atmosphere of panache in spite of its age. Her hair was ragged and full, intricately tangled and interwoven, distracting immensely from the distinction of her face. Her visage was riddled with dense and innumerable rills and creases, heavy about the eyes and maw. Lips full, dry, and wrinkled, turned heavenward upon the revelation of the two youthful frames impeding the already scarce moonlight.

"The Frumps!" she exclaimed, "Come, step quickly, the procession's already started. We'll cut through the house and slip right in."

The alarmingly sprightly matriarch had already dismissed her butler with a nonchalant wave of her hand and begun her deft navigation of the dank and dusty interior of her once lavish and doubtlessly resplendent home. The girls made pace rather impressively, though Morticia hindered with every step as she strained her eyes against the dark to better appreciate the exquisite oddities embellishing every inch of the retired old mansion. Her lips parted in awe at the magnitude of it all, the ambiance of the groans and wheezes of a house in splendorous disrepair and the pungent odor of wood rot and senescence.

"You'll have to excuse the darkness. With all the excitement about a death in the family, we've hardly been inside at all. Everyone wants a turn to see the body, what with that massive hole in his stomach." The elderly woman digressed with a sigh. "It's not often people die at twenty-nine, but Balthazar, the lucky cad, was stabbed clean through the abdomen. He bled to death in this very house."

"How morbid," the golden haired Frump replied, "Should I expect to see a ghost this evening, Mrs. Addams?"

Morticia interjected, powerless to contain her glee. "Don't jest."

The all-consuming gloom and listlessness of the manor's stale and antiquated entrails were abruptly penetrated by a sheen of weak and tarnished light. The heavy rear door wailed haplessly aside until silenced forcibly against the concurrent wall, and beside the aperture stood Mrs. Addams with a dauntingly manic simper scrawled across her immaculate personage. Ophelia ambled with the innate rhythm of a silent song through the doorway without qualm, though her sister lingered in the starless pitch. The haggard head of household piqued a long-since manicured brow at the svelte creature before her.

"Dear, there's a decomposing body in my backyard," she placed a weathered hand upon the small of the girl's back, coercing her onto the deck with unparalleled charisma. "If that isn't reason to celebrate, I don't know what is."

The back porch was not particularly expansive, an unforeseen contradiction to the size and grandiosity of everything else claimed under the Addams name. The splintery floorboards groaned and shrunk beneath the slight girth of the women it accommodated - every step a palpably threatening gamble. The joyous exposition resided a number of meters across the yard, radiating with furtive decadence and merrymaking, even as the eulogy was presented. On either side of the celebration were picturesque features; a sprawling cemetery overrun by the vaporous evening haze, and what appeared to be miles of humid marshland to the west. It was then, as the young woman surveyed her surroundings, exploring the chilling topography at face-value with inspired and novel eyes, that she grasped the extent of the Addams family's renown and irrevocable proclivity for the bleak. Her typically sluggish heartbeat accelerated by bounds, the corners of her carmine lips manipulating the fragile contours of her face with a grin. She was comfortable there, on temperamental grounds, flanked in all directions by mystique and the implication of danger. For an instant, the vicious cold did not sting her skin.

"Your sister's found herself a seat already." The old woman remarked, gazing out over her property with something similar to whimsy in her foggy caramel eyes. She turned with half an ounce of effort toward her companion, smirking. "She's personable, isn't she?"

"Very."

She migrated to the foot of the decayed flight of steps and into the grass, motioning the girl closer with the same flick of her wrist she had used to instruct her butler. Morticia was inclined to obey. "Keep close behind me. We'll sit up front with my boys."

The girl was unsettlingly proficient at obeying orders, the woman pondered. As they strode liberally around the perimeter of the largely sedentary crowd of family associates, friends, heralded family members and the like, Morticia was keen in keeping her head down and uttering not a sound. And yet, she was analytical in her surveillance of those in attendance, conscientious of everyone's presence without meeting the eye of a single one. It certainly was a skill honed to proficiency, if not perfection. They arrived at two barren chairs in the foremost row as a woman of age, significantly younger still than Mrs. Addams, led the family in homage to the corpse encased in an ebony coffin behind her. She was gangly and gauche with a wide gait and a nearly emaciated figure, one bony hand enveloping a microphone whilst the other gestured sporadically with regard to her active audience. The girl sought perch discreetly.

Mrs. Addams leaned near in her seat, voice hushed. "That's Cousin Colic, Balthazar's mother. She insisted on doing the eulogy herself."

She then indicated the pair of unruly men to her left with a proud grin, her beady eyes glinting with something Morticia did not recognize. With one hand, the woman attracted the wandering attention of the young man nearest in proximity. She glanced back at him and muttered something incomprehensible to the girl's untrained ear, resulting in a replication of her ministrations by the stocky fellow to the man beside him. She returned to her place with a mockingly exasperated sigh, though the smile remained.

"Those are my sons, Fester and Gomez," her leer seemed only to magnify as their names filled the air. "They always get so rowdy at family events, you understand."

"Of course." Morticia was tempted to peek over her host's shoulder and surmise the men, but retained a pretense of ladylike patience. "Which one is going to marry Ophelia?"

She laughed wholeheartedly. The resonance was jilting in its immediacy, considering the care she had taken not to disrupt the proceedings before, but Morticia was quick to adapt. She found herself chuckling too. "Oh, that. Ah, well, Fester's the eldest, but I'm much more concerned about his brother as far as women are concerned."

"Why's that?" She promptly amended herself. "If I may ask."

"He's a slag," amplified the amiable rasp of the ambiguously portly man beside Mrs. Addams, his hairless brow set in a convoluted knot although a grin manipulated his lips. "It's different girls every day with him. I don't know _where_ he picked the habit up, but I wish he'd put it back."

"Fester, please," The woman pleaded unconvincingly.

He scoffed in an oddly jovial fashion, casting his immensely fatigued eyes skyward. His complexion was positively sepulchral, rivaling even Morticia's own in sallowness. His face, though youthful, was sparsely marred with erosions of the flesh about the mouth and forehead. His eyes were inviting and friendly despite their dullness. His irises were as black as the sickly rings about them, due in no small part to exhaustion. From the copious knolls of skin about his jawline to his galoshes, he was enshrouded in foolhardy slate hide, clasped in a long row of ivory buttons spanning the entirety of the cloak and his body. He thoughtlessly thumbed at the smock's lapels as he spoke.

"How many more will you let him get away with before he brings home a blonde?"

"A_ blonde_!" the tenor was purged from the body of the man to whom it belonged as though it were poison. Sudden and passionate, laced with the same unmistakable accent as his mother, the younger of the Addams men exclaimed his repulsion.

He whirled about immediately, an amputated human hand nested upon the broad slope of his shoulder. His anger was tangible; his large ebony eyes narrowed in accusation and masked beneath the thickness of his dramatically arched eyebrows. He grimaced in resentment, upper lip ornamented with a meticulous layer of hair. Flawless olive flesh molded the aquiline contours of his face, the architecture of which transcended anything Morticia ever had beheld in precedence.

She experienced the physicality of the very breath in her weak lungs fleeing her body, her heart lingering on one beat and never quite concluding. Her chest collapsed with the loss of formerly plentiful oxygen, shoulders falling limp and utterly useless at her sides, and her expression stiffening to that of exultant awe and bewilderment. An alien numbness and retardation set awash her entire body, fingers interlocked in her lap and curling perpetually taut against one another until pain resonated throughout her nerve endings, though she made no attempt to alleviate it. Never before had she felt so cavernous and void, nor ever so impacted. Her voice was nothing. The nauseating crawl of her flesh indicated that she had been quite violently stricken by a train and injured beyond repair. She dared not doubt or disturb the idea.

"Really, Fester, what kind of an animal do you take me for?" he spat at his brother with a look of injured disbelief. The bachelor tore his eyes from his elder sibling with the slightest of disapproving grunts and shifted to pointedly address the woman who had been rudely misinformed about his person. His every sinew seized.

Fine motor skills were lost on him as he gazed unabashedly at the resplendent beauty seated decidedly much too far away. He was all too tempted to reach out for fear that words would no longer serve in his favor. Instead, he remained stagnant, in a disconcerting state of limbo. His thoughts were nebulous, inexpressible in any way comprehensible to anybody, himself predominantly. His heart was a bird of prey confined to the ivory rails of his ribcage, fighting tumultuously with the immobile constraints of its prison. He desired to do everything, was compelled to, and was at once reduced to nothing at all. It was both the most inconsequential and crucial endeavor of his life to glean the name of the woman with the unattainably long obsidian curls and the massive doe eyes to put the very moon strung up over the horizon to shame. The creature with the most enticingly pert crimson lips ever he had witnessed, the willowy unadorned neck.

Entire moments had passed. Neither spoke. She wouldn't at all, Gomez conjectured, if he didn't do something to elicit it. He swallowed roughly on the unwelcome lump in his throat. He glanced briefly to the disembodied appendage at his shoulder for something akin to audacity.

"Miss," he breathed unsteadily through his nostrils with a diminutive and masculine chortle, uncertain of himself for the first time in all his life. He'd try again. "Senorita, I don't - Did you say what your name was?"

The girl struggled with a smile, but still found her face concrete. "Morticia."

"Morticia," he sampled the word with his own tongue. "That's beautiful."

The young entrepreneur had a loose awareness that his mother and brother were engaging him in conversation, or at least endeavored. Their respective tones fluctuated indistinctly and uselessly against defiant ears. He was consumed, initially, by the pensive silence that the girl had taken, but easily became enamored with the sound of her voice as she parted her lips once more.

"Thank you," she quietly said, glancing momentarily away. His heart lurched. "'Gomez'; where is that from?"

He answered without delay, an arrogance not unlike that displayed by his mother overshadowing his blatant captivation for but an instant. "Castile. It's a family name."

"A king?"

"A conquistador," he corrected with a wry smile.

Seconds escaped the pair like oxygen from perishing lips, and still Gomez's eyes remained fixated upon her. She felt his intense gaze burrow into her flesh and singe her veins. She expunged herself of every desire to meet him with the same vivacity. The confounding sensation welling up inside anchored her feet to the piecemeal clumps of lemongrass littering the yard and was slowly ascending, compressing her organs and brimming in her throat. Her compulsion to escape was rivaled and wildly outweighed by her inclination toward the man two seats to her left. Even as she glared craters into the earth beneath her heels, she felt herself drawing nearer to his sensational gravitational pull. Her maw, stained scarlet, tethered into an involuntary simper.

The party was coming to a monumental conclusion, indicated by the calamitous edict so unexpectedly proclaimed by the gawky woman occupying a makeshift stage crafted hastily, yet efficiently, of wormwood and hammer and nail. She crooned clamorously into the device poised by a limp hand, a guileless and unattractive smile spewing words of jollity.

"And so, my friends, my associates, my fellow Addamses," Colic projected to the visibly restless compendium, "Let's not mourn Balthazar, but remember him warmly for his cunning, his successes in the stock market, and his slapdash fencing! Don't fret Gomez, we won't be pressing charges. I invite you all to join us in the ballroom for the post-mortem reception."

Suddenly the rear lawn was engulfed by the shifting, shuffling fray, some lumbering about to exchange tales and jokes and fill the solemn evening with the discord of laughter and engrossed prattle. Others flocked to the casket, either to pay respects or acquaint themselves with the cadaver as they did fellow party goers whilst all the ports spilling into the estate oozed with a constant flow of people seeking entrance and others fighting the current to escape the haughty circulation. Morticia's eyes meandered from the soil to scour the crowd for even a glimpse of austere curls amongst the droves of ebon.

Her partial vigilance was further damped with the resplendent and discombobulating drawl of the man she was feebly adamant in evading. Her spine erected and her nails embedded themselves painfully into the flesh at the back of her subdominant hand. She lilted her brows in accordance with the slight quaver of his intonation, feigning composure to the best of her ability, though he did not mask his sentiments whatsoever. For that, she was endeared all the more.

"Care to go for a stroll?" he proffered a hand, each of his calloused fingers spread equidistantly from one another.

She glanced between his polite offering and the sober grin embossing his face before gingerly placing her palm in his own. The contrast in size and texture was evident immediately, and they reveled in it. Her fingers contracted in his grasp as she allowed him to assist her to her feet, still weighted by anxiety.

"You aren't going to stay?" she inquired, though she willed him to deny it immediately. "These are your people, aren't they?"

"I don't like people." He remarked plainly. Even with a deadpan, a nearly tangible gaiety and ease bled from his every word.

"I don't believe you."

"You probably shouldn't."


	3. Walk With Me

**A/N:** Maybe it's me being gracious or maybe I'm just really too lazy to release these chapters at a steady momentum. Chapter four is well on its way, hopefully within the week. Readers are appreciated, reviews are revered. Thanks so much for the support, but if you'd really like to make my day, I suggest going to Providence's Mibba page and reading it there in its original state. Happy November, everyone.

**Disclaimer:** None of the following characters, plotlines or productions are trademarked or registered to me. All Addams Family and related media are legally bound to the Chas and Tee Addams Estate.

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He had anticipated catharsis from the moment he stood from his chair and plucked her out of the crowd. When she permitted his hand to embrace hers, even for a few chaste seconds, he affirmed at once every thought he had sustained and even those he had yet to imagine regarding the frail and frolicsome, feeble and fantastic young woman. The slightest twinge of her demure claret lips inspired infinitesimal inquiries that demanded answers upon inception. Every dramatic shutter of her thick eyelashes resulted in a silent plea for her to cast those thoughtful blinks in his hemisphere. His fingers intertwined respectfully behind his back, for fear he'd scathingly ensnare her freezing hand once more, without the luxury of consent.

Deep set and remotely fatigued ochre eyes tentatively shadowed the actions of the careful creature beside them. Her attention wandered patiently across the fog obscured terrain as they traversed the land in tandem. She smiled keenly at the sparse fronds of barley fluttering limply in the weak gale and ascribed an eager and certainly accidental peep to the threadbare coppice of exotic brush to the graveyard's eastern verge, visible only by silhouette as projected through the vapor.

Gomez chortled at the diminutive, girlish sound. "Do you garden?"

For the first time since they had departed from the party, she turned her attention to him. In one swift movement, she turned toward the man, targeting him with an almost accusatory glance, though a noncommittal corner of her mouth bowed heavenward. "Mostly poisonous herbs and thorns. I've been raising an African Strangler for some time."

"We have a conservatory here at the house," he gestured nebulously in the direction he thought the manor to be, "We aren't getting much use out of it, however. Mama tried to keep a trellis, but these garish petals kept sprouting up out of the vines."

"I usually prune those when I can, but Ophelia just gets so upset." The girl's eyes broadened and her already sunken, sallow cheeks grew paler and thinner. She took an elaborate step away from the Addams boy as her courtly smile transmuted into a guilty scowl. Shaking her head indignantly, she drew a palm along the curvature of her cheek and wound her free arm across her midsection.

The young man advanced without hesitation, breaking the tenuous link of his fingers and halting them in midair before embracing her forearms with his hands. He grated his jaw in frustration and seethed something incomprehensible betwixt strained ivory teeth. He softened as he spun his eyes upon the distraught woman and dropped his arms to his sides in defeat. He sighed, purging himself momentarily of the desire to envelop her petite frame with those same arms, lying inert and purposeless in favor of reverence.

"What's the matter?" he conceded.

"I left my sister at the reception," she cringed, "She wanted to meet you, this evening."

"Another time," the man proclaimed dismissively. He strode forth an ample many paces before whirling about with the grace of a seasoned dancer. Without confirmation of any form, Morticia decided it was true.

His hand was protracted cordially, coaxing her along as the dense ashen clouds pooled fervently behind him. The girl smiled and accepted the offering, but allowed the link to hinder.

Guided by the hand, the two ventured further into the labyrinthian burial gardens. Gomez was only remotely conscious of the vivid tales he recounted to the attentive creature poised still in his hand. With every gravesite, epitaph and marble statue in memoriam, a brief and whimsical history waltzed into the air from his lips in a murky cloud of nostalgia. The soothing vibration of his voice, full of bravado and the charm that only his peculiarly stark Castilian accent could convey, complemented the romantically abysmal realm erected around them. The dry and wheezing pleas of arid and unattended vegetation underscored the Addams' man's musings whilst the whistling breeze accented every articulate flick of his tongue.

The soil whereon the pair rocked collapsed in subjection to the respective soles of the man and the girl. Her eyes, luscious and wide as the bulbs of the greying flowers laid upon the mounds of earth all around her, were drawn sporadically with the course of her chaperone's artful storytelling. His free hand gestured from grave to grave with an enviable affluence.

Their fingers disengaged one another as the man leapt with a spritely fervor atop the base of an explicitly extravagant stature – a man with an enticingly reproachable face. The stranger's likeness was not clad unlike the young man strung about its foundation. Garbed from the similarly athletically sloped shoulders with fine and expensive fabrics such as the vintage double-breasted overcoat, the subtle suggestion of a satin waistcoat buried somewhere beneath its thick predecessor and trousers spanning the entirety of the men's lengthy legs and disappearing beneath the hem of its correlating jacket, all decorated with ivory streaks no thicker than the width of a needle. The effigy was of a man of a certain age, the sort that appeared boyish with the unsubtle implication of wrinkles and a chin that, had it been comprised of flesh and bone and blood, would be stippled with black and grey. The statue had to have been generations senior to Gomez's estimated early twin decades, though a tangible charisma radiated from the lifeless marble of the dead man's artifice.

Something in the air seemed to ream Morticia's politely withdrawn smirk into an entity a tad more sincere.

"And it was then that my father took the liberty of perishing the poor bastard on his rapier. The very one I spar with today, in fact." His large brown eyes were illuminated by the light generated only by the human spirit. He jabbed a calloused thumb behind him. "Charles Addams, I mean. That'd be this fellow."

The girl's brow hooked on a pressing query. "Charles?"

"I suppose he went by 'Chas' more than anything else."

"He's your father, then?"

"Well, Fester's too."

She smothered a laugh with her plush scarlet lips. "You look like him, I think."

"Better." he grunted amiably as he dismounted the prestigious family's patriarch's likeness. "Are you still thinking about your sister?"

Morticia was surprised. "It's expected, isn't it?"

"Are you?" he stole a few paces closer, all remnants of excitement and unabashed glee absent in his suddenly stern expression.

She felt challenged. "Concerned, yes. She's marrying you, so I can only imagine what she'd think if she knew what I was doing."

"Walking?"

She frowned at him, though her heart convulsed weakly at the visible response it incited. "This isn't a routine stroll."

"It doesn't feel that way?" his lips reeled downcast in discouragement, though his tone seemed entirely too hopeful.

"Certainly not." She began to walk in another direction with no intent of leaving. His immediate presence was too much for her to match with apparently inalienable savoir-faire.

The girl heard him advance toward her still. Her heart disrupted the sedentariness of her ribcage, brittle and thin. She bore feckless teeth in an unbridled grin, protected from the imploring eyes of her companion, and clasped a hand to her chest. She waited.

"Tish, can I ask you something?" His breath seemed strenuous to maintain, and the evident falter of his powerful tenor furthered the degradation of the cemetery. Her head tilted curiously at the foreign and endearing moniker. "You can't be upset with me, either. I don't know what I'd do with myself if that happened."

He hadn't waited on an answer, regardless. "When I saw you, something brilliant and horrible happened."

"That isn't a question."

The man ignored her wholly correct observation and gently guided her in a slow and friable pirouette so that she might face him. He craved the duress of his beating heart when under the surveillance of her tactful gaze. A flavor of urgency pervaded the sentiment on his tongue.

"My insides have become some ornery beast and, frankly, I'm finding it hard to breathe. It's strange, considering air has never tasted sweeter to me, before. I'm talking a whole lot this evening; that's not unlike me. However, the only thing I _want_ to say, it seems, is your name. Even now that I have your attention, I feel this pressure as though I might vomit some Steinbeck or Shelley. Do you understand?"

He nodded expectantly at the girl lingering of her own accord in his expert grasp. Morticia pretended for a moment that it was a language barrier betwixt them – him and her – but thought better of it. Never before, had life been such an absolute privilege. She beheld the abject, happy desperation smeared across the comely bronze slab of Gomez's countenance with a sorrowful scoop of her brow and a covetous smile.

"Yes, yes I do." She wondered if it would be inappropriate at all for her to shed a tear.

He grinned. "Then you'll be merciful when I tell you I love you."

"Gomez." She had nothing to say beyond that. He understood.

Abruptly, their connection was pried asunder as the aforementioned man fell to his knees atop the loathsome, damp earth. His hands hadn't the luxury of idleness as, immediately, he spun his large fingers about the soft and innocent plane of porcelain flesh gilding his companion's hand. He stroked the upper surface of her palm with one of his thumbs as though he were pacifying the incessant wailing of his overwrought soul. His eyes scoured her face in idolatry from the ground, an unassailable and artless toothy smile occupying his maw from beneath his mustache. His burly chest heaved as he forced himself to take another breath.

"Marry me."

That wasn't a question, either.


	4. No

**A/N:** Okay, so, I'm literally the worst at keeping to my word. I had planned to release this on Sunday, or maybe even later into next week, but I'm much too excited to get my stuff out there because I've been working so efficiently as of late. I'm rambling. Please enjoy yourselves as always, but I do ask that you don't be a silent reader. Reviews make my entire day.

**Disclaimer:** None of the following characters, plotlines, or related products or productions belong to me. The Addams Family and all related media are copyrighted to the Chas and Tee Addams Estate.

* * *

"There was a time when I thought 'goodbye' was the saddest word in all the world."

"Sunday?"

Mouth agape with woeful words primed for delivery, the speaker halted suddenly. The man cinched his dark eyes taut and circumnavigated on the haunches of his seat, disdain littered across his bronze countenance. He toyed listlessly with the silken collar of his paisley housecoat while his other hand fostered a momentarily discarded cigar.

He maintained his rueful glower, his voice flaring once again with annoyance instead of contemplative dejection. "It transcended language itself, I thought. I would think 'How harrowing it must be to hear a word that means you won't meet again. How painful,' I'd say. 'How cruel.'"

"But now," he exclaimed with a weighty Spanish inflection, "I know that 'no' is the single most painful thing ever to hear, ever to say. It's all I can think. It's binding my tongue and shackling me to my place. Fester, I'm rotting alive!"

The paunchy man at the other end of the room lolled his eyes, labored by gamey black semicircles. His brother had an incurable proclivity for drama; he knew and was acclimated to the precarious art of skirting about him during his bouts of disconsolation, but never quite recognized the legality of it all. He prodded a jagged pawn forth upon the chess board with the knobby broadside of his forefinger, eyeing his opponent with facetious voracity from across the tabletop.

"That's the most reassuring thing I've heard you say in a long while," Fester muttered with a sardonic melody bobbing subtly at the recesses of his throat.

There was a short but remarkable silence in the parlor that afternoon as Gomez indulged in a long and toxic drag of his cigar. He turned loose a laden sigh amongst billows of wan and odorous smog. "You're a hateful reptile, old man. Your own brother is _dying_ right in front of you and all you can do is spite him."

A half-satirical scoff surfaced from the bowl of Fester's chest. "You talk a lot for a guy who has his tongue tied."

Gomez drew his fingernails rakishly through his disheveled tawny tresses and delved deeper into the unaccommodating upholstery of the easy chair upon which he sat. "I just don't understand. What did I do wrong? Where did I fail her?"

The elder of the Addams brothers watched in mildly engrossed intrigue as a bodiless hand scrambled deftly across the board and nudged a knight into place with a contorted middle finger. He furrowed his naked brow and expelled a gust of air through his nostrils. The clever hand had apprehended his pawn. He whetted his lips with his tonguetip as he scrutinized their shared checkered plain.

"I imagine it's the part where you're engaged to her sister." He wagered in apathy.

"I never agreed to that!" the mournful man shouted stringently.

"You didn't have to." Fester allocated another pawn to a more satisfactory position on the warfield. "You slept for three entire days after Morticia rejected you. Mama didn't want to keep Ophelia and her mother waiting, so she took it on herself."

"Without my permission?" his spine was rigid and he buried his fingertips into the stale and brittle arms of his chair. His legs were reared back as though he might spring into a gallant and entirely typical stance and be rid of his morose ennui yet. Fester hoped.

"It's incredibly difficult to talk with you when you get like this."

"Heartbroken? Tormented? Rent asunder by the very woman that makes this wretched heart of mine beat for someone other than myself? _Lazy_?" the fluid architecture of the Addams manor carried the reverberation of Gomez's voice beyond the room he, his brother, and his dearest friend had so miserably occupied. He swelled with dampened pride at the power in his tone, echoing ever still off the mildew infested walls.

"_Dramatic_." his rejoinder was blunt.

He glanced between his brother and the game at hand, pursing his lips and eventually relinquishing a resentful sigh. He pressed his small palms, marred with sealed lesions and freshly encrusted blood clots from ventures undertaken in his workshop, against his thighs and eschewed himself from his seat. Before stalking raptly toward the impassioned younger man, however, he rotated a generous few degrees to address his opponent with a warning glare.

"Thing, don't you dare cheat." He righted himself and trudged ahead. "And while we're on the subject, I'd like to remind you that that 'woman' is only seventeen years old."

"That's ridiculous. Who told you that?" Gomez sputtered incredulously - the first smile he had managed in days, albeit entirely sarcastic.

"Her mother! I was in the study with her and Ophelia and asked a thing or two about Morticia."

Too emotionally fractured, the younger of the men could not find the audacious inspiration to repel the repulsive thought with a snarling retort and receded once more into the chair. He closed his eyes for a few precious seconds and relished in the sickly sensation of noxious fumes dilatorily flooding his lungs and numbing the agonizing throb of his heart. At the sound of Fester's voice accruing an incommunicable and undesired message, he struck up his index finger and instructed him to halt there, with the words barricaded in his larynx. He was patient in holding his breath, shoulders easing and terse brows lessening in severity as his sensitive lung tissue stung and recoiled at the smog saturating it. He exhaled with a blissful sigh, although his expression translated sorrow.

"You traitorous bastard." He calmly said, eyes still closed, frown still firmly impressed upon his skin.

The opaque haze dissipated throughout the room but left a phantom scent in its wake. A distinctly saccharine stench clung to the clothes of the men and the various antiques populating the room, leaving an earthy and eerily refined atmosphere contingent upon the cohabitation of odor and décor. Fester wrinkled his nose.

"Is that Rosado?"

Gomez took another dependent puff of the slowly incinerating cigar.

"You _are_ depressed."

The olive skinned man nestled his forehead against the rough exterior of the divan, seeking comfort where there was none. Clouds of tobacco smoke liberated themselves from his nostrils like a deadly airborne tide and for a moment Fester was quite legitimately aware of the disparate nature of his younger brother's heart. He collapsed atop the chaise lounge adjacent to the easy chair Gomez had sought refuge in.

"I need her," the young man lamented.

Fester swallowed harshly on emotions he didn't understand. "You knew her for an hour, and spent the next seventy-two dreaming about it."

He said nothing.

"All this over one girl? Gomez, what about the droves of women that you paraded through the house, before? All hours of the day, not a single one the same ever since you got back from Harvard." His efforts were laudably exhausting.

"What women?" he replied as though it were a statement. He turned to face his brother after a perilous period of disquieting quiet. "Are they still here?"

"Mrs. Frump and Ophelia are still upstairs with Mama. Morticia hasn't –"

Suddenly, he stood. His chest was nearly concave and his normally commendable posture was cumbersomely bowed due to his debilitating melancholy. He doggedly squared his shoulders and began to shed his robe, motioning thing along with his cigar toting hand. The heft of the room lightened with the cluck of the younger man's tongue against his cheek, every assertive stride he forced into action. Fester grinned unceremoniously to himself as Gomez entangled his fingers in the fibrous length of mooring rope dangling from the ceiling and yanked with all the strength he could muster. The house thundered beneath them as a sepulchral chime granted life to the industrial underbelly of the mansion and for several moments thereafter as Lurch lumbered into the room.

"You rang?" the mammoth man drawled tentatively.

"Lurch, start the Packard, I've some business to attend to." Gomez commanded. "Thing, I'd hate to disturb your game any more than I already have, but I'll need an address on the Frump household rather quickly."

"Immediately," Lurch supplemented from afar.

"My mistake. Immediately, Thing. Thanks, old boy." He watched with a strained smile as the hand crept agilely from the table and into the foyer.

"You can't." Fester remarked from his place, entirely as unpersuasive as he was wont to be. "You _know_ you can't."

Gomez grinned.


End file.
